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Paxton Hibben
Paxton Pattison Hibben (December 5, 1880 - December 5, 1928) was a diplomat, journalist, author and humanitarian.
Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, he graduated from Princeton University w...view morePaxton Pattison Hibben (December 5, 1880 - December 5, 1928) was a diplomat, journalist, author and humanitarian.
Born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, he graduated from Princeton University with honors in 1903, then earned a law degree from Harvard. He chose a career in diplomacy and succeeded in getting a personal endorsement from President Theodore Roosevelt in 1905 for an appointment in the Diplomatic and Consular Service.
His first post was in St. Petersburg, where he witnessed the bloody street fighting of the 1905 Russian Revolution. The Russo-Japanese War had just ended and there were a number of Japanese prisoners of war interned in St. Petersburg, to whom Hibben volunteered aid and repatriation assistance, earning him the Japanese government’s highest civilian medal, the Order of the Sacred Treasure, in 1906. He then joined Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party campaign for the presidency in 1912 and served as full-time director of the Progressive Service’s Bureau of Education.
With the outbreak of WWI in 1914, Hibben turned his hand to journalism and became a roving war correspondent, first for Collier’s Weekly and later for the Associated Press. The AP sent him to Athens in 1915 to cover Greek politics, where he became an ally of King Constantine.
When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, Hibben volunteered for officer training in the Army and rose to the rank of captain in the artillery. He served in France during and after the war. He then served on a military relief commission in Armenia, and went on to assist the Red Cross in its efforts to rescue children in the Russian famine of 1921-1923.
He wrote extensively on politics and international affairs, and published books on the Russian famine, the Greek monarchy, Henry Ward Beecher and William Jennings Bryan.
His untimely death in New York City in 1928 at age 48 was honored by the Russian government with a hero’s burial in a Moscow cemetery.view less